BBC Reviews Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 537
An anonymous reader writes "Now that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has made its debut in London, reviews are now beginning to trickle in. The BBC's review can be summed up in one sentence: '... somewhere in the production process the crew has lost sight of the fundamental aspect of the books - they were immensely funny."
perspective. (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting to read, and written with an easy style that said "come back and read more!" sure, but not funny.
Not to me, personally, and not speaking for anyone else.
Re:Is it a "negative" review? I dont think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I plan on seeing it, but I also plan on going out of my way to read every last negative review and whiny Aint-It-Cool-News tirade which warns of how bad it is before seeing it.
The more I lower my expectations going in, the better the chances that I might extract a little pleasure out of watching what is bound to be a very flawed adaptation of my absolute favorite childhood novel.
Re: not quite true (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ok, now that the movie is out of the way... (Score:1, Insightful)
sick (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fun Game! (Score:0, Insightful)
Did you see the US version of Coupling? Same English writers, actors with better teeth, but really a third-rate production.
Douglas Adams lived in America for much of his life and knew better than to insult us by not crediting us with being able to follow his stories of byzantine complexity. It's one of the reasons why he was a best-selling author, and the jackasses behind the BBC/FOX Doctor Who TV movie are now bussing tables.
Re:My Verdict (Score:5, Insightful)
Curse you for giving away the part about Malkovich, it would have been an entertaining surprise.
Re:My Verdict (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on, now. Deliberatly saying something's bad just so that the downloaders can claim they're sticking it to The Man for making bad movies... that's so, well, earlier this morning.
Re:Movie reviews usually suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
I myself was part of that culture, and now as a successful adult I can look back and recall all those childhood memories this movie brings up. The aweful clothing, the moon boots, the tater tots for lunch. For a lot of people, it's like their childhood (except streched out into late high school and taken to the extreme).
I, Robot didn't suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fun Game! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, considering only an American company would buy the rights to a show that was a ripoff of something they themselves produced in the first place, does it really surprise you that it was bad? As for The Office, the American version is absolutely dreadful. Hey, let's toss out anything that was remotely funny about the original and turn it into complete shit. Then let's sit there scratching our heads wondering why it didn't do well...
Re:Is it a "negative" review? I dont think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know what my favorite moment in the story is?
When Arther Dent, stuck on past Earth, announces that he has decided to go mad.
Ford suddenly appears and agrees that it's a good idea.
What I like about that moment is that I didn't really care for anything which came after it. Don't get me wrong, the prose was still very funny, but all this stuff of Aurther learning to fly, a planet-wise parody of what a boring sport cricket is, the truck-driving rain god, and the destruction of all possible alternate realities... It just wasn't up to snuff with the book material spawned from the original radio plays.
So, I have decided the following:
Arthur really did go mad at that moment. Ford never showed up. Arthur never learned to fly. Mattress creatures did not flollop. The reincarnated plant did not seek out revenge against Arthur. None of it happened. It was all just the delusions of Arthur's madness.
Looking at the final three and a half books of the trilogy in this light makes them much more enjoyable for me, especially since it discards the "Goddammit! I'm not writing a sixth book ever! Fuck all you drooling fanboys who will demand that my publisher lean on me to write more!" fatalistic ending. YMMV.
For that matter, one could take this premise and craft a fairly amusing fan-fic which picks up just as Arthur recovers his sanity, still stuck among the cave men.
Re:Movie reviews usually suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
This pretty much renders your opinions on comedy invalid, doesn't it?
Go ahead -- mod me 'Troll' for speaking the truth! The world will remember me!
Everything good about the guide is in the LANGUAGE (Score:1, Insightful)
Loved the books, but as a movie? (Score:5, Insightful)
An example from the famous babelfish passage:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
How the heck are you supposed to film that and keep some semblance of flow to the story? You could do it as a voiceover I suppose, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot yet passages like this are a defining feature of an Adams book. I'll be interested to see if they attempted to put passages like this in the movie and if they can pull it off.
Compare with LOTR, or Harry Potter, or any Michael Crichton novel, which are more plot driven works and thus can translate to a visual medium like movies and still capture the spirit of the original text much better. At least IMHO
Still, I'm intent on seeing the movie and hope it retains some of the classic Adams humour...
I Robot (Score:3, Insightful)
The movie wasn't a retelling of the book, but you'd be nuts to try it. The book is a string of disjoint short stories. The same characters keep poping up, but they are complete stories unto themselves. You could perhaps make a mini-series out of them, but I don't think the majority of the American public would GET IT.
The movie it self though was very true to Asimov's theme, which was basically "Given these three laws, how can things go wrong while the three laws are still being obeyed... and then how can I get these characters out of this mess?" additionally, they brought in the concept of the 0th law that we saw at the end of the Robot novels (although in this story line with tragic consequences).
Perhaps the name was a bad choice, but it got the fan's attention. However, equally well it could have been called "The Three Laws", or something simmilar.
Re:Fun Game! (Score:3, Insightful)
But why should I have to compare it to that one to enjoy it?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Movie reviews usually suck. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Loved the books, but as a movie? (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny the first time... (Score:4, Insightful)
I see your point. The first couple times I thought the H2G2 books (the first 3 anyway) were quite funny. The 4th was thought provoking and the 5th quite a bummer.
I did find, 10 years after reading the first three that I found them to be more cynical than I recalled, with some fairly biting sarcasm embodied by certain characters and actions I didn't really see before. Eventually I believed it was funny while taking aim at a lot of things Douglas Adams probably found frustration with, like satire. There certainly are some very visible satirical references, but it seemed to me that like much humor there is often a target which is true, though by not being familiar with it we don't get all of the joke.
Napoleon is in a class of it's own... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lines like:
"Pedro offers his protection", or "You gonna eat those tots?", while on there own don't sound funny, it the right context with people who know the reference can be fairly entertaining.
I'd say Napoleon is funnier after you've see it, not while you're actually watching it.
I still liked it better than "Friends", ugh, I'm glad that's over.
Sean D.
Re:Fun Game! (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't say this is true in general.
Perhaps I should be posting anonymously, but I, for one, was a big Three's Company fan.
Hardwired didn't suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
Then again, I haven't seen it, because of what Will Smith said on Leno: "It's very faithfull to the book [...] My character is the only man on earth who doesn't trust robots, everyone else does..."
Yeah, that is the exact opposite of the book, jackass.
Asimov's estate should sue them for diffamation... if they weren't busy swimming in their giant cash-filled swimming pools from all the horrible crap they've sold labelled as "Asimov's
Re:Loved the books, but as a movie? (Score:2, Insightful)
> keep some semblance of flow to the story? You could
> do it as a voiceover I suppose, but it has
> absolutely nothing to do with the plot yet
> passages like this are a defining feature of an
> Adams book. I'll be interested to see if they
> attempted to put passages like this in the movie
> and if they can pull it off.
Easily. It gets changed to dialogue. Ford explaing to Arthur... Hollywood does it all the time.
One of the hardest things for a screen writer to write is good dialogue. It is absurd to throw out such great prose. Unless the hollywood re-writers, the people who punch up the script and trim out unneeded dialogue, had no idea that the lines were actually supposed to be funny.
Mostly Harmless SPOILER (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, OK, fine. There's many good bits in MH, but why end on such a downer? And even though the dark ending did sort of fit in with the general theme of "the big bad universe doesn't care" it seemed pointless. I got the sense Adams was in a bad mood while writing the thing.
Nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
You could use it to hold popcorn, to wrap yourself in if the theatre is too cold, and if you carry a tube of cyanide stitched into the lining, you could kill yourself if it is too much to bear.
Most importantly, you could cry into it if the reviews are right
Don't Panic! - The Review Isn't Consistent (Score:5, Insightful)
Sam Rockwell does a great turn as Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed president of the galaxy; Mos Def is passable as Ford Prefect; while Zooey Deschanel is beguiling as Trillian
Then a few paragraphs down we get this:
Did I say characters? Hmmm. While Dent is a familiar cipher, audiences will be left clueless by Ford Prefect, bemused by Zaphod Beeblebrox and indifferent to Trillian.
Indifferent to Trillian? I thought the actress playing her was "beguiling"!?! How can an actress potray a character in a beguiling way that leaves the audience indifferent? That's almost as funny as some of Adams' turns of speech. :)
In brief, the reviewer liked the movie, but didn't like all of it. In fact, he called it a "charming mess". Having been a fan of Adams' work for over twenty years I had always been under the impression the same could be said of the books. And even Adams' own later sequels lacked the punchy humor and wit of the originals. It is hard to make lightening strike twice.
I recently downloaded the BBC's HG2G TV adaptation. Although some parts are brilliant, many parts drag and are truly awful. Translating Adams' writing style into a visual medium is bound to be difficult. Even the British couldn't get it all right.
Re:Hardwired didn't suck. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hardwired didn't suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not going to be exactly the same, no. But it should at least somewhat resemble the book. The only thing that the movie 'I, Robot' had in common with the book was the title and the names of the characters. NOTHING ELSE. They took a random sci-fi script and grafted the names onto it.
Re:Fun Game! (Score:3, Insightful)
Case in point: "Whose Line is it Anyway?"
It's a show that progressively got more and more American comedians, but still remained funny, in large part because the host was a balding British guy. :-) But seriously, it worked because they weren't trying to dumb down the humor for American audiences. The Drew Carey version... still funny, but I only saw about one episode of the new Whose Line that even approached the humor of the original British show.
Re:Fun Game! (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you on that one, and to me it's actually a proof of two things.
1 - The basic concept was strong enough. (Apparently a tried-and-tested improv formula anyway)
2 - Something can be less than the original but still actually work.
It felt like a very different beast in some ways, yet still taken from the same mould in others. And in a way that's possibly the best way to go about such things.
Having said that, Whose Line did have one major thing going for it. It's real strength wasn't it's Britishness, it was the format. And it showed. Even though the Drew Carey version wasn't quite in the same class in my opinion, it was still a really fun show to watch.
Re:I, Robot didn't suck. (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree, totally and completely.
It drives me nuts that so many people are so keen on every movie that is based on a book, comic, historic event, etc. being perfectly accurate to the original source. People get so hung up with how the movie compares to what they've cooked up in their imaginations when reading the book/comic that they forget to watch the movie for the movie. The nice thing about books, comic, and many other ways of telling stories, is that they allow you to fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Nobody's imagination is exactly the same, so any movie based on a previous work will never be exactly what you were hoping for. But it can still be a good movie in and of itself!
If you are so devoted to a story that you can't bear any innacuracies in a new interpretation of said story, don't go see the movie. It'll just piss you off. And for God's sake, if there's a movie coming out that you know is based on a book/comic, don't go out and read the print version right before you see the movie. With the original story fresh in your mind, the inconsistencies will drive you nuts even if you're not an accuracy nazi. The fact is, because movies are limited in time, budget, acting skills, etc., they will be more limited than your imagination.
There's probably a lot of people out there who are thinking "well, that's bloody obvious..." as they read this. But there are so many accuracy nazis out there who freak out at the slighest deviation from the print version that these facts obviously have to be stated again and again before they actually understand. If you can't enjoy a movie simply because it is an entertaining movie, and not because it is precisely accurate to an author's deathless prose (which, by the way, has been gone over by an editor with a fine-toothed comb and picked apart so it'll sell well long before it was released to the masses), then you shouldn't be going to movies in the first place.
And yes, some of the movies based on previously created stories do suck in and of themselves. But not all books/comics are all that good either. They just don't tend to flop on the front page of the newspaper's entertainment section, they tend to kind of slide into ambiguity.
The evolution of DNA.. (Score:3, Insightful)
#1. Most of the best humor just wouldn't work in a movie format. Why? To do it well you'd need an absurd amount of time, and as well, the story would start to drag on. Really.
Now, from what I'm hearing, they're filming a TON of material for the DVD version. Meaning that all the stuff that didn't make it into the theatrical cut, may very well make it into an actual "Guide" cut, with all those little asides that make the book.
A DVD package with "Don't Panic" on the cover and given the LotR extended edition treatment? Oh yes.
#2. Like it or not, he's just not the same guy he was when he wrote the book. Hell, he wasn't the same guy when he wrote the sequals. And one thing that DNA wanted, was to update HHGG..the philosophy and feeling behind it, to get it out of his past and move it into the present. And because of that, after he died, when the production team had a doubt about the tone of any of the material, they looked up his latter stuff. To see how it would go, and work.
Maybe that's the ultimate problem. The true fans wanted the classic, but that's just not going to happen.
Re:I was wondering about that... (Score:3, Insightful)
This, of course, was not the point. The comedy derives from Fawlty's failure, and bystanders' horror at the way this man runs a hotel, just as The Office runs on David Brent's horrifically misguided approach to management. Both take on characters we've all met - surly hoteliers or awful coworkers - and then eliminate the redeeming features and turn everything wrong about them up to eleven.
I think it's this dark side that drives a lot of British comedy and makes it so distinct from the American variety. American remakes tend to kill off British comedy, because they try to force in some Beautiful People when the story really calls for twisted monstrosities...
Re:I, Robot didn't suck. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, these are poor examples. My vehement dislike of I, Robot and HHGTTG is not based on being a fanboy accuracy nazi.
It's just that I:
expect a film that claims to be "inspired by the writings of Asimov" not to have the hero deal with a robot problem by shooting them with a big gun.
expect a film that claims to be "inspired by the writings of Adams" to have some bloody jokes in it.
Re:Hardwired didn't suck. (Score:1, Insightful)
If this was the case, why did he feel like talking like he had? THAT was stupid, and it's entirely fair to blame him for that silly comment. If you haven't read the book, don't comment on book's (lack of) similarities. Stay quiet, look smart. But no, that's not Will (nor 90% of other movie actors).
Re:A bit picky, but, (Score:3, Insightful)
God forbid it should not be the complete title in it's entirity every single time, lest the IRA get over excited about it and decide to blowup some [more] children. Thanks but I'll stick with using 'Britain' (and 'UK' when I'm feeling like being particularly terse).
I think we've had enough disagreement and killing over it, and we could officialy rename the entire country Earwig [everything2.com], or 'nation fourty four' (after the country code) for all I care.
Re:I Robot (Score:3, Insightful)
Strict moral rules are entirely appropriate for children, who are often protected from the subtlety of circumstance (discretion is so important in ethical decision making). But once a certain sophistication of cognitive development is reached, simple rules no longer cut it. The exceptions become too numerous and too compelling, the consequences of mistakes too severe.
This is one of the reasons why religious morals are historically so destructive: the attempt to treat adults like children, with tragic consequence. But then I'm hijacking your remark to make my point. Sorry about that
Regards,
Ross
Re:Fun Game! (Score:3, Insightful)